ABL Review at a Glance
- Title: Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job
- My Rating: 4.5
- Genre: Nonfiction
- Format: ARC*
- Publication Date: February 25, 2020
- Author: Bruce Daisley
Book Blurb
“An important reminder of simple everyday practices to improve how we all work together, which will lead to greater team and individual happiness and performance. Great results will follow.”—Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square
“With just 30 changes, you can transform your work experience from bland and boring (or worse) to fulfilling, fun, and even joyful.”—Daniel Pink, author of When and Drive
The vice president of Twitter Europe and host of the top business podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat offers thirty smart, research-based hacks for bringing joy and fun back into our burned out, uninspired work lives.
How does a lunch break spark a burst of productivity? Can a team’s performance be improved simply by moving the location of the coffee maker? Why are meetings so often a waste of time, and how can a walking meeting actually get decisions made?
As an executive with decades of management experience at top Silicon Valley companies including YouTube, Google, and Twitter, Bruce Daisley has given a lot of thought to what makes a workforce productive and what factors can improve the workplace to benefit a company’s employees, customers, and bottom line. In his debut book, he shares what he’s discovered, offering practical, often counterintuitive, insights and solutions for reinvigorating work to give us more meaning, productivity, and joy at the office.
A Gallup survey of global workers revealed shocking news: only 13% of employees are engaged in their jobs. This means that burn out and unhappiness at work are a reality for the vast majority of workers. Managers—and employees themselves—can make work better. Eat Sleep Work Repeat shows them how, offering more than two dozen research-backed, user-friendly strategies, including:
Go to Lunch (it makes you less tired over the weekend)
Suggest a Tea Break (it increases team cohesiveness and productivity)
Conduct a Pre-Mortem (foreseeing possible issues can prevent problems and creates a spirit of curiosity and inquisitiveness)
“Let’s start enjoying our jobs again,” Daisley insists. “It’s time to rediscover the joy of work.”
My Thoughts
Work burnout is real.
You love your work, your workplace, even your coworkers and boss, but you still find yourself restless at work. It seems like the same thing day after day with no progress and no end in sight.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job is a book with practical tips to combat those exact feelings. And when I say practical, I mean actual, practical, useful things you can do today to make work more enjoyable and productive.
For example, the walking meeting. A lot of people believe if they are not working at their desks, then they aren’t working, in large part because their boss can’t see them if they aren’t there. If a manager puts his/her trust in their employees to complete their work, then being seen shouldn’t be an issue. So walk during your meetings.
When I worked in a large office downtown, I used to take my handsfree phone earpiece and walk during calls. Not only did I feel better, but the increased energy and bloodflow made my thoughts clearer and more focused. I highly recommend walking and talking whenever possible.
Some of the examples were more helpful for someone in management, which makes sense, Bruce Daisley was an executive at many Fortune 500 companies. Like banning outside electronic equipment during meetings to get everyone to focus on the meeting.
I’m in love with the idea of a Hack Week. Since Twitter was born in a Hack Week, it’s already proven itself immensely useful to my life, and I’ve never participated in one. The idea that we have an entire week to think, create, and design anything to make the company better? If I could have done this at my job, I know I would have been more engaged, if only because it would have gotten me out of the monotony of my job and into thinking critically about my workplace as a whole.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job, is immensely readable; an easy to understand book full of tips that anyone can initiate in their own work-lives to help find fullfillness and balance.
*Special thanks to Bruce Daisley, HarperOne, and TLC Book Tours for providing a copy of Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job in exchange for an honest review.
Sara Strand says
I love the idea of a hack week as well! I know in a couple of my previous jobs if I would have had more time to improve systems, I would have been more productive, but nope! It was definitely the biggest frustration. Thank you for being on this tour! Sara @ TLC Book Tours